Murder on the Llano Estacado

By Marlowe J. Churchill

About the Book
In this haunting account, Marlowe J. Churchill investigates the secrets of a family tragedy from nearly 100 years ago. This mystery has haunted Churchill’s mother and was rarely discussed. Almost 100 years ago, the Hassell family suffered a major loss after the brutal murder of Susan Hassell and eight of her children, murdered by her new husband, George. The tragedy became a focus of people nationwide, outraging the people of Farwell where the violent crime was committed. This heartbreak caused serious emotional damage and is a fascinating story about the Texas justice system of 100 years ago.
About the Author
Marlowe J. Churchill is a retired newspaper journalist residing in Southern California with his wife. Being a father and grandfather, he is the author of many other works. During his writing career, Churchill has covered thousands of news events and has traveled worldwide on assignments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Dec 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798888127391

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The contents of this work, including, but not limited to, the accuracy of events, people, and places depicted; opinions expressed; permission to use previously published materials included; and any advice given or actions advocated are solely the responsibility of the author, who assumes all liability for said work and indemnifies the publisher against any claims stemming from publication of the work.

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2023 by Marlowe J. Churchill

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, downloaded, distributed, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without permission in writing from the publisher.

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[West Texas] is a paradise for men and dogs, and a hell for women and horses.

—New York Evangelist, 5 June 1884, p. 2

Prairie madness or prairie fever was an affliction that affected settlers in the Great Plains during the migration to, and settlement of, the Canadian Prairies and the Western United States in the nineteenth century. Settlers moving from urbanized or relatively settled areas in the east faced the risk of mental breakdown caused by the harsh living conditions and the extreme levels of isolation on the prairie. Symptoms of prairie madness included depression, withdrawal, changes in character and habit, and violence. Prairie madness sometimes resulted in the afflicted person moving back east, or in extreme cases, suicide.

Prairie madness is not a clinical condition, rather it is a pervasive subject in writings of fiction and non-fiction from the period to describe a fairly common phenomenon. It was described by Eugene Virgil Smalley in 1893: an alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new Prairie States among farmers and their wives.[1][2]

To my mother, Bonnie Belle Churchill, whose memories of this family tragedy prompted my writing this narrative.

PROLOGUE

Traffic was backed up at the railroad crossing that connects Farwell, Texas, and Texico, New Mexico, two tiny towns that, more than a hundred years ago, competed fiercely for the wages of cowboys anxious to take a load off after weeks in the saddle. Waiting for the freight train pulling more than 100 graffiti-stained boxcars to clear the crossing, I was eager to finally visit the place I had imagined for years, the place where my great aunt Susan Ferguson Hassell and eight of her children were murdered one by one just before Christmas 1926 as they slept. It was a grisly crime that would shock the nation. But there would be many more grisly murders to shock Americans in the years following, and my family’s tragedy would be forgotten for the most part, except for a few in my family who sought details about what had become a family secret. As my elders passed away, I found myself asking questions that nobody in my family knew much about, and there were few documents available to plumb for information. I was on a mission to find out what had happened in Farwell that so bedeviled my mother to the day she died and now was consuming me. I had always doubted my mom’s curious story about my great aunt.

Mom and I had a stressful relationship after I started school, probably because she was a hovering mother who worried about me getting dirty playing in the yard and preferred me playing the piano over my preference of football and baseball. Due to the tension between us, youthful arrogance, and inconsistencies in some of her tales, I began doubting her stories of being able to ride a horse like a jockey and all her fanciful references to ranching and the Old West of cowboys and Indians. Once I saw my mom in her prim dress climb onto a picnic table to escape a curious horse that had interrupted our picnic lunch by nudging her for a treat. My father came to her rescue and shooed the animal away, reprimanding me for laughing instead of helping her. I remember thinking, why would a person raised on a ranch be afraid of animals? And a person who had the skills of a jockey would not need rescuing from a horse.

Her vague tale of a homicide in the family seemed to me to be utterly fanciful, or perhaps a gross exaggeration. I admit that again, due to my stubbornness and our tenuous relationship, I decided it was another of my mother’s tall tales. I never really asked her any questions about it.

She continued to lose credibility with me as I grew older and continued to doubt her tales, and I pulled away from her as she began to hover over my little sister instead. There’s a saying I heard from Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative journalist Bob Greene of Long Island, New York’s, Newsday, that described how journalists think: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. And so after I retired, I did. When Mom died, I decided a good project would be digging for the real story about the supposed homicide. I knew only the barest of details. I knew the first name of a victim, whom my mother knew as Aunt Susie.

Just as the westbound train cleared the tracks, it revealed the caboose of a passing eastbound train. Both trains left the crossing at the same time in opposite directions, and there, from the windshield of my rented Wrangler, was my first glimpse of the town of Farwell, Texas. I felt great excitement, like the curtains were parting just before the movie would begin. A tall grain silo dominated the town. I couldn’t wait to see more.

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Entrance to Farwell, Texas

Here was a place that had lured Aunt Susie, her children, and her new husband to relocate from Oklahoma and begin a new life on the Llano Estacado—country flatter than flat, so empty, beautiful in a subdued, desolate fashion. The Spanish name for the region roughly translates as Staked Plains, and folklore tells of early Mexican and Spanish explorers who poked stakes into the flat ground to mark their way into the unknown, so they could safely return.    

I knew that the murder site was a mile east of town. I could not wait for directions. After an unsuccessful attempt to find the house on my own, I reluctantly drove back into town. The courthouse and jail were my next immediate objective, and I was astounded to see the historic brick courthouse—the very courthouse I would soon discover was the scene of the most famous murder trial West Texas had ever witnessed. Standing near the courthouse was a two-story abandoned building: it was the jail I had been told had confined the killer.

Farwell was waiting for me.

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Historic Parmer County Courthouse where Hassell trial convened

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Farwell’s old jail where Hassell was confined

Christmas Eve, 1926

Early Christmas Eve morning, just past four o’clock, Lindop (first name unknown) heard something in another part of the small farmhouse. To him it was still an unfamiliar home with unfamiliar noises, and there was a guest sleeping in another room—a guest who had been acting rather odd in the past few days. He had been withdrawn and sullen when eating dinner with Lindop and his family.

A faint noise, perhaps the rustling of his restless guest unable to sleep, came from the guest’s room. Lindop and his family were still recovering from the big move out of their previously rented farmhouse a mile away to this rental house. His family was taking over the rental from a fellow farmer, the man in the guest room, who was pulling up stakes and moving on from Farwell.

Although the lease was now theirs, Lindop and his wife had agreed to let their guest remain in the bedroom for a few more days, so he could finish cleaning it and packing his last belongings while wrapping up his local business and before rejoining his family, whom folks heard had moved back to Oklahoma. It was an awkward time, with him broodingly sharing dinner with the Lindops and their boys and the baby, then retiring to his room about nine o’clock every night.

The house was cold when Lindop first heard the noise, and his wife figured Hassell might be trying to start a fire. She told her husband to go get the fire going, knowing Hassell would not be able to figure out how to operate their stove, which they had brought with them in the move. So Lindop got out of bed and got a good fire roaring to heat the house before hearing their guest summon him for help.

Hassell had sold everything he owned at an auction that had brought lots of people into the Lindops’ new home and backyard in the days before Christmas. There was something about him that made Lindop uneasy. When the Lindops had toured the house before deciding to rent it, Hassell had stood in the guest room doorway and adamantly refused to let Lindop and his wife check out the room. Lindop would later testify to this in court. Hassell had made an excuse that he was still cleaning the room and it still housed some of his belongings. In hindsight Lindop would remember that moment and wonder.

Lindop tapped on the guest room door, which quickly opened. Hassell asked Lindop to get a doctor, so with no inquiry into the problem, Lindop awakened one of his sons and dispatched him to bring the doctor. With no idea what was going on, Lindop checked on Hassell again; Hassell remained quiet. Lindop never described what he saw inside the room nor the appearance of the man seeking his help; in short order, his wounds would be discovered. The third time Lindop ventured into the room, Hassell asked quietly if the doctor had been summoned.

Told the doctor was being called, Hassell then said, Bring Jim Martin.

Who is Jim Martin? Lindop asked.

The sheriff, Hassell replied.

Lindop later said he was so concerned at that point that he got his wife and family into their Ford at about 4:30 in the morning and drove the short distance to Judge James Hamlin’s home. Hamlin owned the home Lindop was now renting and owned a good portion of the rest of Farwell, too. His wife, Kate, oversaw the business of their rental properties. Hamlin called Sheriff Martin at Lindop’s request.

When Lindop returned to the farmhouse later that morning, the backyard was crowded with people digging in and standing around a big pit. It was a crime scene, but in 1926, there was no plastic yellow police tape to protect what police were beginning to uncover and no understanding of securing the site. People were trampling all over it.

And that’s when everything changed in Farwell, Texas. In 1926 the joy of Christmas was overshadowed by an unspeakable horror.

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George Hassell, executed in 1928 for murdering two families. Photo provided by Lana Payne Barnett.

Sheriff Martin and the county attorney were already familiar with the wounded man, George Hassell, and his family. Some of his neighbors had recently reported suspicions regarding the whereabouts of Hassell’s family. In fact the sheriff and county attorney had interviewed Hassell and had been waiting on confirmation that Susie Hassell and her eight children were where the man had said they had gone. During that interview, Hassell reacted to the questions about his family as if it were nobody’s business but his.

The Lindop home was abuzz with activity. The noise of shovels chopping into the cold ground, the crowd’s anticipation of what might be unearthed. The biting cold made the work and wait all that much harder. Men would later testify about the freezing sleet they experienced as they toiled in the early-morning darkness. Mini clouds formed with each breath they exhaled.

The moment the men with shovels found the first sign of Hassell’s missing family was shocking for these farm folk, who to that point had led quiet lives raising livestock and crops, tending to their families, and looking forward to a new year that might bring a bit more prosperity.

Word quickly spread about the horrible scene behind the Lindops’ new home. The local historical society later commissioned a history of Farwell. That Christmas was remembered with this entry:

As the year 1926 drew to a close, the inhabitants of Farwell were getting ready for a big Christmas. Crops had been good, cattle prices were high, and the farmers and ranchers were in a holiday mood. They were unaware that tragedy had struck their community once again.

(The previous tragedy was a huge arson fire that had devastated the downtown.)

I don’t remember when I first heard about my Great Aunt Susie. Certainly it was not from my grandmother, Susie’s youngest sister. Grandmother was a quiet, stern woman who was always very busy cooking and caring for my family on our biannual visits to her home in Colorado. My grandfather had Parkinson’s disease, and I couldn’t understand the words he mumbled from his bed, where he spent most of his last days. I treasured a photograph of him as a teenaged rancher courting my grandmother, driving a matched pair of white horses pulling a shiny black carriage.

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Author’s mother, and granddaughter Tiffany Anne

My mother, born Bonnie Bell Beagle to Ethel and Forrest Beagle in Perryton, Texas in 1916, did a lot of talking when I was growing up. She was a great conversationalist and storyteller, who regaled my little sister and me with stories of being a child of the Western frontier, the same frontier of Zane Grey novels. She was Grandmother’s sole daughter in a family of five rugged and tall sons who all fought in World War II and Korea. Grandmother doted on her, teaching her the things wives needed to know in those days.

Once, while walking home from school, Mom and a younger brother were kidnapped near their Colorado ranch by a man desperate to ransom them. Miraculously he released them unharmed hours later. Her kidnapping became a story we heard frequently. Although as I grew older, I tended to listen to Mom’s many stories with skepticism, I do believe this kidnapping actually occurred. My grandparents were well-off, and a botched kidnapping for ransom was more than conceivable to me.

Mom was sent off to college in California for an education while her brothers were either high school drop-outs or lucky to graduate before enlisting in the military. They later raised families on the wages of blue-collar work. In her early twenties, Mom became a school teacher in a tiny, rural school house west of Montrose and near Grand Junction, Colorado. She would leave her teaching career when Dad returned from fighting in World War II to raise her two kids.

Her grade-school students, the kidnapping incident, her Shetland pony, and the Native Americans who visited their ranch and camped beside the creek when she was young were the stories repeated time and again as the four of us traveled from one military base to another during my dad’s Air Force service. I wanted to listen to the radio, but Mom insisted on silence, so she could reminisce uninterrupted.

Once as we passed through her birthplace—I must have been seven or eight—her memories prompted the first narrative about Aunt Susie. For the first time, I heard the word murder when she spoke of my aunt. I listened intently to her words of her aunt being murdered, but she never added that others were also killed or where and when this all occurred. It was as if she were recounting events the way the ten-year-old she had been would have.

From then on, this story would be repeated whenever Mom heard mention of either Texas or some other gruesome crime. I do not recall any other details that Mom shared about the murder, and I just wonder whether I was tired of hearing the story and skeptical and tuned out other details. My sister believes our grandparents shielded Mom from many details when she became obsessed with the murders and possibly slipped into depression and forbade Mom from bringing up the story again. There never seemed to be a complete story that made any sense to me, and maybe in retrospect, Mom simply did not know much more than she shared with us. When her mind darkened with dementia, a story of her grandfather being advised by a lynch mob to tip his hat if he wanted the mob to lynch the killer became her mantra as I sat with her at a nursing home and watched her wither away. Just before her death in 2012, I asked her where this murder occurred and the name of the killer. By then it was too late for her to help me understand.

My cousin Sharon Edgar remembers hearing of Aunt Susie’s murder from her father (Mom’s eldest brother) but never in any detail. Sharon, the eldest of us eighteen cousins, heard her grandparents, her uncles, and perhaps my mom sitting around a dinner table during a family reunion in Montrose, Colorado, where my grandparents then resided, as they discussed the murder, but she does not remember details. Her sister, Sue, told her that their father discussed the murder with her and her two other sisters after Sharon left home, went to college, and married—never in any detail about what happened but as a worried father understandably concerned about their boyfriends, and later, their spouses.

It was as if my mom’s family vowed to keep the details of the tragedy a secret from my generation.

Guilt over my youthful skepticism and stubbornness preventing me from ever drawing out the full story from my mother dogged me for months after her death, and I vowed to uncover the full story. As a newspaperman, I knew how to dig for details. But I also understood that finding documents from nearly 100 years ago would be a challenge.

What was Aunt Susie’s last name? Where did this murder occur? And when?

First, I dug up some family history that I thought might include Aunt Susie. Eventually my sister